About D. Vance Smith
D. Vance Smith is a scholar whose work explores the deep historical, philosophical, and political connections between Africa and Europe. His research bridges African and decolonial theory, African futurism, medieval philosophy and literature, ecocriticism, and the history of anthropology, with a particular focus on how medieval systems of knowledge and governance continue to shape modern colonial and postcolonial realities.
My work
Focuses on African and decolonial literature and theory, Africanfuturism, the history of anthropology, the medieval roots of colonial administrative and ideological structures, ecocriticism, and medieval philosophy and literature.
My most recent book is Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (University of Chicago, 2025). Atlas’s Bones is an intellectual history about 1) the classical and medieval production of knowledges in Africa, and 2) the imposition of medieval structures of knowledge and governance on African colonies.
I’m working on a related book, Blood Flowers, a study of the environmental and human costs of the African conservation and flower-farm industries, and the medieval roots of the land laws that empower them. On the medieval side, I’m writing a book called Love Without Object, a study of love objects in mysticism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.
I spend considerable time in community engagement, community building, and radical pedagogy in Trenton, Princeton’s much-neglected and over-extracted neighbor. I’m currently one of the five members of the Princeton faculty who live there. I serve as the Board Chair of Artworks, Trenton’s umbrella arts organization, and as the Board Vice-President of Passage Theatre, Trenton’s professional theater company.
Biography Continued
My 2020 book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press) is the third book in a series examining the medieval limit experience—the philosophy and literature of beginnings, middles, and ends. The first, The Book of the Incipit, concerns beginnings, with Piers Plowman as the central exhibit. The second book, Arts of Possession, examines the concept of dwelling in medieval romance and economic theory and practice.
I’ve written a number of articles on a wide range of topics: epic in Kenya; trees in Africanfuturism and medieval logic; Chaucer and Africa; Piers Plowman; grammatical theory; nationalism in medieval literature; logical fallacies and close reading; tragedy and Middle English literature; textual editing and manuscript transmission; book history; the masculine body in Middle English writing; women’s account books; medieval institutions and literature; medieval literary and philosophical form. I’ve edited or co-edited books and special issues of journals: The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (with Andrew Cole), Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (with Holly Crocker), and an anniversary issue of New Literary History on medieval cultural studies (with Michael Uebel). I’ve also written a number of prefaces and afterwords for essay collections and journals.
I grew up in Africa, learning isiNdebele along with English as a member of the Khumalo clan of the amaNdebele, and attended an all-African high school in Kenya, where I also spoke Kiswahili and early Sheng (the Kenyan street vernacular). Before graduate school, I wrote two ethnographies on groups of people in South Sudan. I used to think of my African background and my training in Western European culture as a biographical contradiction, but they have put me in the possibly unique position of working on the many profound connections between precolonial and postcolonial Africa and the European Middle Ages.
I’ve been a Fulbright Scholar (at Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s College, London), an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center, a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an Old Dominion Professor.
Scholarship, Community, and Background
Smith has written extensively on topics including epic in Kenya, trees in African futurism and medieval logic, Chaucer and Africa, medieval grammatical theory, nationalism in medieval literature, logical fallacies and close reading, tragedy and Middle English literature, manuscript transmission, book history, gender and embodiment, women’s account books, medieval institutions, and literary and philosophical form.
He has edited or co-edited multiple books and special journal issues, including The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates, and an anniversary issue of New Literary History devoted to medieval cultural studies. He has also contributed numerous prefaces and afterwords to essay collections and scholarly journals.
Smith is deeply committed to community engagement, community building, and radical pedagogy in Trenton, New Jersey, Princeton’s long-neglected and over-extracted neighbor. He is one of a small number of Princeton faculty members who live in Trenton.
He serves as Board Chair of Artworks, Trenton’s umbrella arts organization, and as Board Vice-President of Passage Theatre, the city’s professional theater company. His community work reflects a belief that scholarship and cultural institutions carry responsibilities beyond the university.
Smith grew up in Africa, speaking isiNdebele and English as a member of the Khumalo clan of the amaNdebele. He later attended an all-African high school in Kenya, where he also spoke Kiswahili and early Sheng, the Kenyan street vernacular. Before graduate school, he conducted fieldwork in South Sudan and wrote ethnographies based on that work.
What once appeared to him as a contradiction between an African upbringing and training in Western European medieval studies has become the foundation of his scholarly practice, positioning him to trace the profound continuities between precolonial and postcolonial Africa and the European Middle Ages.
Smith has been a Fulbright Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s College London, an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center, a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an Old Dominion Professor.
Latest Book
Atlas’s Bones
The book reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil’s Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage.
Atlas’s Bones tells the story of how Europe created a false “medieval” version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, “Reading Africa,” traces Egypt’s, Libya’s, and Carthage’s influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, “Writing Africa,” focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law.